Mark Burton, of Tydd St Giles, and his wife Jane were enjoying a stroll through Black Dyke at about 4.30pm on January 3 when they came face to face with a large creature.

Mr Burton said: “We were walking down the lane at about 4.30pm. We looked down the pathway and saw this black thing. We could make out the shape of ears and two front legs. It was bigger than an Alsatian.

“It froze and we froze. We both looked at eachother but, by the time we had composed ourselves, it had gone.”

There have been eight big cat sightings reported in Cambridgeshire over the past three years.

One ‘sighting’, according to police files, was last year in Friday Bridge near Wisbech, where unconfirmed reports noted a “panther seen in back garden”.

Mr Burton suspects the creature killed one of his geese two weeks later.

He said: “We keep about 50 geese and two weeks later one of the geese had its head completely taken off.

“All the breast meat and leg meat was ripped off, with just the carcass left.

“We have fox traps set up but there was no sign a fox had been there. Anyway, foxes drag geese away to a bush to be killed.”

Have you had an encounter with the ‘Fen Tiger’? E-mail james.podesta@archant.co.uk